Not to summon him. Just to give him the last piece of me I hadn’t already destroyed. And everything went quiet.
2
WOLFE
The screen was still lit.
Her message waited, bright and raw. A photo of drywall—cracked at the edges, smeared faintly with dust. A panel. A hiding place. Something secret and small, made sacred by what it held.
If you want it, come get it. Please.
No punctuation. Just that word.
Please.
It sat like an open wound.
My thumb hovered over the screen, unmoving. A pulse ticked through my jaw—tight, sharp. It wasn’t rage or grief. It was something older.Deeper. The tension I’d trained into silence. The kind you learn when you're taught softness gets you killed.
A twitch in the corner of my mouth tried to form something. It wasn’t a smile. It was the barest flicker of something mechanical. The echo of violence. Of purpose. The memory of hands wrapped around throats that lied. Of knives held steady while a man begged and I didn’t blink.
I zoomed in.
Not on the wall.
On the fibers.
The photo showed more than drywall. More than betrayal. It showed her. The shirt she’d used to wrap the ledger—mine. Black. Thick. Familiar. The same one I left draped over the back of the chair after my workout.
She didn’t just take the book.
She wrapped it in me.
And that’s when it hit. Not heat. Not fury. Not the fire that came later.
This was colder.
Steel-edged.
Final.
I stared at the screen and let the seconds bleed. Thirty-eight, exactly. Because I counted. Because that’s how long it took to kill the version of her I kept alive in my head. The girl who came back with shaking hands and blood on her skin. Who looked at me like I was the only thing anchoring her to this world. Who slipped, because she was scared—but stayed because she loved me.
That girl was gone.
What she left behind was calculated. Cruel. Composed.
She didn’t scream. Didn’t rage. Didn’t accuse me of anything I wasn’t. She just left the ring on the dresser like it was a receipt. Like I was a transaction. And then she touched the only thing I told her never to go near.
Legacy.
She went back to the beginning.
To the place where everything that mattered was born in blood and bound by oath.
I blinked once. Let it settle. She sent this message not to be saved. She wanted to be punished. I gave her rules. She gave me blood. I gave her safety. She gave them war.
Now? She could have both.
